ITIL® 4 Foundation – TOP TIPS to help you pass your exam

hi everyone uh welcome to this live stream i do apologize to everyone for the delayed start of this live stream we ran into some technical difficulties uh as we got started uh today's live stream panel is going to be sharing some tips to pass the idol 4 foundation exam uh we'll even take some time to look at some of the questions from the sample paper and our panel of experts will give their opinions on how as a student you can approach the question and get to the correct answer so let me introduce the this panel that we have for you it's probably the best panel we've ever put together and i'm going to start going uh in clockwise from the lower left hand corner of my screen which might not be the same as what you're seeing i fully appreciate that but in the lower left hand corner of my screen first is claire agata uh claire is the founder and uh one of the principal drivers behind a wonderful training provider called itsm.zone right at usm.o um based here in the uk but it's an online training provider and of course her courses are delivered across the world uh not just itil there's a there's a lot of really good content available through her website so i do encourage you to take a look at that next on my screen uh we have kakuru ikebu whose last name i've probably butchered completely i apologize uh kakuru kakuru is a trainer with um ideapreneurs in japan uh you don't quite live in tokyo but close to tokyo if i if i remember correctly uh outside of idle training kakuru is also quite active in delivering training and consultancy on a wide variety of topics including uh devops working with dasa out there in japan next up we have uh stuart rams uh stuart's been a long time contributor to itil going back i believe even to idle version two days uh most recently he has been the lead examiner for uh idol four and has been uh the driver behind designing the exams and the style of the questions that we created for uh each of the exams in item 4. next up we have john sorry and sir grant's uh offers not only training but consultancy as well through his company called optimal service management he's also a very active blogger not only on his own website but for a vast variety of websites across the itsm ecosystem next we have john custe from the jpc group based out in boston john is a longtime idol trainer but is also active in a number of other fields uh which we were just talking about before we started this call so john's been working in areas such as governance quality management uh compliance and and various others and last but certainly not least on lower right of my screen is vishal vyas from nolathon it based out of india i think vishal you're based out of pune specifically right uh you're on mute yes uh yeah i think i've tended to meet vishal more in delhi although i know he comes from punes it's been one of those things uh but uh nordathon is a very well established uh indian um ato and uh i've met vishal uh as he's delivered training to a wide variety of clients uh all across india but mostly in delhi for some reason as i said so that's a brief introduction to our panel i'm not gonna spend too much time because of the delayed start but also because i want to get to the the heart of the the uh the the session itself so first let's i'm going to throw it open uh over to stuart because stewart you've been the lead examiner for it for as i said you were the person who helped design the level of difficulty the style of the exams what gets covered in each of the syllabi and so on so for our audience would you be able to describe sort of the thinking behind the item for exams especially if foundation sure so i'm mainly going to talk about the question writing the style and approach of questions but the first thing i want to say is that the whole exam is based on a syllabus if you haven't read the syllabus then go and read it before you even think about approaching an exam the syllabus will tell you exactly what it told the people writing the exam questions what's going to be examined to what level of difficulty how many questions on each topic it will arm you with the information you need to prepare the exam paper is a 40 question paper and the questions are basically very straightforward every question has a one or two sentence introduction and then asks you to pick answer a b c or d and one thing that it's important to know is that out of those four answer options one of them is definitively correct it's not just better than the other answer options it is completely absolutely correct and the other three answers are definitively incorrect again they're not just worse than the right answer they are wrong answers that can be very helpful when you're coming to answer an exam question because if you're not quite sure which is correct you might well be able to identify all the wrong answers because as i said they're not just worse than they're definitively incorrect there's only two levels on the bloom's level that we use for setting these questions that we used in itil foundation level one typically what it says in the syllabus is recall the definition of recall remember do you recognize this thing and i'll give you an example of that in a minute level two expects you to be able to describe something so it might expect slightly different wording slightly diff more more knowledge and understanding of the concept the syllabus is drawn up is separated out into assessment criteria and each one of those tells you what you're supposed to know tells you at what level bloom's level one or two and also tells you how many questions there are so for example one assessment criterion says recall the definition of and then it lists service utility warranty customer user service management sponsor so that tells you that you're likely to get two questions covering those definitions and remember each answer will have one that's correct and three that are incorrect and when we were writing the exam questions we had a number of rules that we tried to follow we couldn't follow them 100 of the time for complex reasons but most of the time we did and one of those rules was that the wrong answers aren't allowed to just be a piece of nonsense they actually have to be a real ideal thing so if the question said something like um what term defines the functionality of a service and the correct answer was utility then we might offer you as wrong answers warranty customer and user i it's not a real question you understand the point being what we wouldn't do is offer you the correct answer utility and incorrect answers futility mass spectroscope and actually an end all of the things you see on the paper with a certain very small number of exceptions that are there for good reasons will be real idle things that are wrong um one of the assessment criteria says recall the purpose of the following itil practices and then it lists 15 itil practices and there are going to be five questions on this topic so one of those is information security management so i've just got on this other screen just to make a point i've got the foundation book open in front of me the purpose of the information security management practice is to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business this includes understanding and managing risks to the confidentiality integrity and availability of information as well as other aspects i'm not going to continue reading it you won't get an exam question that lists that whole quite long purpose statement and says which practice is this one of the reasons for that is one of our other rules we try not to have linguistic clues so that somebody who hasn't studied the topic can just look for the word so if we said which practice is designed to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business it's got the word information in it and if we then had what the right answer being information security management and the wrong answer being other topics that will be a linguistic clue that we wouldn't allow so we're much more likely to write a question that says which practice includes managing risks to confidentiality integrity and availability and then we give you four potential practices so when we say recognize the purpose you need to know the purpose statement but you're unlikely to get the whole of it just because we're trying to avoid giving clues of oh look it's got the same word as one of the answers a few other things i'd like you to think about all of the questions are basic simple multiple choice questions there is no case study there is no need for you to analyze a situation to apply your judgment now i've seen very experienced service managers get these questions wrong because they overthink it don't do that the questions are there to check whether you've read and understood the terms and the concepts and the ideas in the idol book we are not trying to judge your difficulty to anna your ability to analyze a difficult situation and come up with the best answer we're not there so if you think you need to do that you've misread the question i'm just looking through i just project that uh stuart so this actually does lead me to a point where i have seen in certain um social media platforms online people sharing what they think is a sample question uh but they're not sort of axolot's sample questions even though it's about item and the way to say to tell that is if you look at the sample paper and we'll be covering some of the questions from that sample paper uh you will see that the questions are fairly simple and straightforward they're a sentence or two sentences maximum it's not a massive scenario of a service manager is faced with a difficult customer who's complaining about x y and z which we're not going to give you a scenario question at the foundation level so if you see questions of that nature sure it might be helpful for to allow in helping you understand the concepts a bit further and to and to be a bit more comfortable with with the subject matter but just be aware it's not an axolot sample question so just be aware of that when you're when you're trying to tackle it because if you find it difficult to answer such questions that's not the size of questions you're actually going to be answering on the proper exam thank you actually that's a really important point and the very last point i'd like to make about how the exam and the questions were designed is we worked very hard to try and keep all of the answer options to similar lengths we've seen papers where the right answer was always the longest one because people kept adding detail to it to make sure it was right there's none of that going on here so the only time you'll see significant length differences is where we've quoted the actual purpose statements of four different things and the purpose statements are different lengths or we've given you you know service level management as one example and service desk is another which is much shorter but they're equally the names of practices but other than that you should see answer options similar links don't go with the old rule of the longest one is right it probably isn't um there is one more one more point i think which we do need to tease out um if i remember this this is all explained in the syllabus if i'm not mistaken but i i believe i'm correct in saying that there are there are no negative questions people won't be asked what is not the purpose let me qualify that we are allowed to ask negative questions but only if the book specifies a negative point that people should understand i can't think of an example off the top of my head but if something in the book says be aware that the incident management practice is not used for managing changes then we might ask that right third point all right um so that was a that was a really quick and brief overview of how we've designed the idol 4 foundation exam and i think stewart's actually already shared quite a few tips uh but i'll come back to stuart for another tip but let's go around uh the panel and i'll start again in the this time in the lower right of my screen so vishal i'm going to come to you first um what tip would you share with our audience who are looking to take the idol 4 exam sure to be honest i had a list i knew stuart was going to tell some of that already so obviously read the syllabus that is quite an important document when you go ahead for the examination and make sure that you understand each and every topic from the syllabus so that's that's definitely the one uh practice purpose statements i have seen uh people who work on that tend to do better in the exam so focus on practice purpose uh i don't know it's really a tip but it's definitely what i use for my advice my students to do create some mind puzzles to memorize certain things so if you really want to remember the flow of instant management i'm not saying there will be a question on that but if you really want to remember a flow of incident management come up with certain acronyms or certain things that are easy for you to remember like d c m i r c does cricket match up when there is years the actual meaning would be detect and record classify categorize and so on let's not get into i mean at that level but try to create some mind puzzles which makes it easy for you to remember some topic and that's not i mean no one is going to take that away from you i mean in the exam or after the exam and the trick that works for me always is i try to find out what are the right questions for remaining three wrong options so you you read a question you know the right answer but then there are three wrong options there right so if a is correct you still have b c and d which are not correct so i try to go into my mind palace and see what would have been the right questions for these three wrong answers which would make these three wrong answers right uh i think that's it uh from my side i'm sure i've eaten into some of the other steps all right those were useful next up to you john what tips do you share with your students the first one is make sure you answer the question that was asked as as stuart as stewart um talked about there's a lot of correct statements that are in there so make sure you answer the question that was asked i i like to say hopefully students when they read it should be able to easily identify two that are incorrect and when you have two that are incorrect and two that i think might be correct go back and read the question um the other big hint i would have is as you go through if you go through and read you know a b oh b is the right answer your brain will not look as carefully at c and d so i like to have people think as you go through think a could be a correct answer or b could be a correct answer and that way when you get done if you have either just one that's that's could be correct you're set but if you have two that could be correct go back reread the question you've probably missed a word someplace and then just one quick second one for those people that read too quickly instead of reading a b c d read d c b a it will slow your brain down a bit and reduce the chance of you missing a word that could cause you to to choose a an incorrect answer so that would be probably the two two additional ones that i would add there okay excellent uh i wish somebody had told me that some financial exams uh stuart you've already shared a wealth of of information uh are there any other tips that you uh would like to pass along to our audience i do have two tips i'd like to share and the first one is nothing to do with helping you pass an itil exam hopefully you're actually going to get some value out of what you're learning on an itil foundation training course and you're going to take that back so that you are more valuable to your employer you're doing a better job you've learned something now a lot of what you'll learn on an itil foundation course you can't implement when you go back to work we might teach you the purpose of an information security management practice that's probably not going to be immediately practically helpful to you when you get back to work the one thing i would like you to take away and actually use the day you get back is the guiding principles these are seven principles that you can use that will help you make decisions prioritize work and resolve conflicts and my strong advice is that you take these seven guiding principles you print them out on the biggest sheet of paper that your printer will handle you stick them up on the wall next to where you work and you actively use them every day after you get back from the training course that way your ideal training will be valuable to you and your employer and then i've got one quick tip to help you pass the exam i have seen people get confused between the terms service value system service value train and value stream if you see one of these in an exam question or in an answer go back and read it again and make sure you've got the right one it's very easy to think you're up being asked about a value stream when you're being asked about a value chain and vice versa so if you see the word value in the question read very carefully because there are a number of terms that include that word a very good point uh kaku we come to you next yes thank you uh some of my tips might be redundant perhaps i got three tips that i can share uh the first one is please understand all the elements of the service value system and like service value chain or four dimensions how are those components are related to each other or how they are related to each other placed uh you might want to create a 3d puzzle to be completed but you can write it down on a piece of paper uh what are those components and then how they are placed in each other and then this should help to picture overall uh of each component and the next one is uh processes or practices as you can see in the syllabus uh these gonna be the questions which will be asked the most so you need to memorize the purposes and then some of the practices you need to understand the definition so for example uh some of the students might be misplace the definition between like a released and deploy there are slight different definitions so please make sure uh you need to see the details of the purposes and then definition of the names of the practices and the last one that i can share is about the guiding principles uh as steward said this is a very important uh item which we can use in when you back to work but for the exam uh sometimes you need to be careful about the aspects of each guiding principles for example which principle applies under like improving quality or like improving customer experiences when you hear those uh aspects of each principles you need to identify which guiding principle applies so that's what i can share for now thank you okay thank you and last but certainly not least claire uh what tips do you normally give your students when they're about to take the foundation exam i've i've got two tips to share one of which is very high level and one of which is a bit more detail-focused and the high-level one is remember why you're actually taking the exam so for most people when we look at our customer satisfaction survey they're taking an exam because they need as part of their role are they doing it for their own personal development and when i was a classroom trainer before i moved into e-learning i could generally spot some of the people who weren't going to do well in the exam because they were the people who came in and in the introduction said i don't want to be here my boss sent me i'm i'm not really interested but you know it's it's it's on my training plan so i've got to be here and i could be fairly confident that they weren't going to pass the exams i think you know you have people who are super motivated they understand exactly why they want this it's going to get them that next job it's going to allow them to be promoted but for people who maybe don't have such a clear understanding of why they're in that classroom or taking that e-learning course find something if you can find one thing in that training course it makes you think a little bit differently it's worthwhile and take the attitude into the exam you know life is short um don't sit there with your arms folded and let a training course pass you by so that's the the high level tip going into much more detail don't talk yourself out of the right answer so it's definitely good practice to go through the paper pick your answers and then go back at the end and like stuart was saying just double check did i read value chain and it actually says value stream so go back and do those checks but don't talk yourself out of the correct answer which is where we come back to this idea of trick questions there isn't this group of evil examiners writing tricky questions to try and catch you out if you're looking at a question think is that too simple maybe there was something maybe i'm missing something it's simple because you know the answer so by all means check look for the obvious mistakes but do not talk yourself out of the right answer because i've seen some very very clever people do that that's a that's a fair point i'd like to offer uh one tip as well which is possibly slightly controversial so i'm you know i'm glad that we're doing this virtually because uh you know i can mute all of you if you start shouting at me for giving a bad tip but one of the things that stuart did mention um which i think is also important to to mention to the audience is that there are no negative marks with idle exams so if you get the wrong answer you get zero you don't get minus one when i've taken idle exams i have been in a situation that where i have looked at the question time and time again for the life of me i cannot figure out what the correct answer is or what the bad answer is obviously bad answers are i am genuinely stuck where i don't have a preference for any of the options in those situations i've and i hate to say this i have guessed the answer because that at least gave me a 25 chance of getting one mark as opposed to leaving it blank which was 100 chance of getting zero so that is my tip as someone who's taken idol exams if you're genuinely absolutely stuck you cannot figure out for the life of you what the right answer is yes because you can you have a 25 chance of getting one mark with that actually i'd like to just follow up follow up on that one that as you go through the exam if you hit that question you don't know skip it and come back to it the odds are you will subsequently get to a question that will jar your memory so rather than pouring over it and getting frustrated uh remembering that you you you can come back to it and and i just did i did remember one other one that i used with classes and i think one thing is our tips don't work for everybody because we all we all think different we all learn differently but for a lot of people i recommend flash cards and there's a lot of great flash card apps that can work on tablets and computers and phones but that's sort of uh i'll say short term memory for the exam because it is closed book but taking that syllabus and using that to go through to sort of you know recall some just quick words uh to associate with things i think is a good technique for some people does anybody remember there's an ital for app i think it includes flashcards but i might be wrong i believe it does uh michelle you had your hand up yeah i just want to uh go back to akshay's point about guessing uh maybe i mean i just need your opinions on that what i have noticed is when people sit through the class for uh the entire duration and they do all the exercises and all the reading that we as trainers give them normally uh they may be guessing at the conscious level but at the subcon subconscious level their guess is normally the right answer so i don't know how that works but i've seen that uh working most of the times i'll share that that is true the the the second tip before we go to the questions there is a second tip and unfortunately this tip does not work in the covet 19 everything shut down scenario back when we used to be able to do things with in with paper exams that's how i took all my ideal exams uh you were allowed to scribble on the exam page on the question booklet you weren't allowed to scribble on the answer sheet but you're able to scribble on the uh on the question booklet and what i would sometimes do especially if i'm using mnemonic devices like what vishal was was suggesting that you make up a little acronym or something like that i would come in and really the first thing i would do is to just scribble that acronym or that mnemonic down on the the cover sheet because in the heat of the moment whilst i'm in that sort of time pressure trying to answer a question i might misremember the mnemonic or i might misremember something so just scribbling it down on that piece of piece of paper on that on the booklet would help now again that might not work if we're doing things online but for those of you who are looking at taking a paper-based exam or once we return to that paper-based world that might be something that you would want to look into as well but let's let's swiftly move on to talking about some of the questions and here my our producer harry freeman is going to do some broadcast magic and move our different pictures around the screen and harry let me know when you're ready to go with question one you'll have to come off you'd harry unfortunately we have to hear your voice on this call okay excellent uh claire i'm going to feed you question number one actually so question number one uh so for all our panelists we're gonna we have about 10 questions obviously we started a bit late and keeping an eye on the clock so let's take a couple of minutes to just describe how we might answer that question how we might tackle that question uh maybe using some of the tips that's been discussed or maybe not that's that's entirely up to you but claire i'll come to you with the first one so which term describes the functionality offered by service cost utility warranty risk thank you very much um he's helping i get this one right it's um one of the things that i like to do because this i have to be honest this is a pure memory question and if you sat through the course paying attention like michelle suggested something you will have gone in if you had your ears shut or you were playing with your phone when this was discussed in your classroom training or your e-learning you might find this one a bit more challenging but what i like to do when i have a multiple choice question like this is see if i can get rid of anything immediately you know stewart's told us as the examiner that there's nothing nonsensical so there's no futility that we can rule out immediately but we can start to look at well is there anything here that just doesn't make sense so we're talking about the functionality that a service offers and hopefully we're starting to think about that meaning what does the service actually do so i'm looking at these options and thinking cost probably not so if i'm acting i'm sat there with my paper exam and my pencil maybe i'll put a little bit of a line through that and risk as well if you were buying a service and one of the functionalities that it was offering you was risk probably as a customer you weren't going to be able to go ahead with that so you basically now choosing between two options so even if you're in that uncomfortable position where you've got to guess you've got a one in two chance rather than a one in far chance which is already a better place to be and some of the other panelists have been talking about using mnemonics and using little memory clues and this is something that can work quite well for you here because we've basically got utility and warranty and hopefully you'll remember from your training that these are describing whether a service is fit for purpose in other words what does it do and fit for use in other words how does it perform is it available is it reliable does it have sufficient capacity so fit for purpose fit for use and one of the things that you know we always kind of say is the two u's don't go together so the you in utility the you in use don't belong together warranty is all about is the service fit for use utility is all about does it do the things that we require it to do so that's the functionality that that service is offering you so it's not a question unfortunately where i can tell you here's the magic formula to get to the right answer but to be honest i don't think we're going to be able to do that for any of these questions but it is one where it's testing you at that that recall level did you hear and understand the definition there are little tricks that you can use and again talking about things like flash cards they're fantastic for definitions like this so you know look at the question if your brain immediately goes i don't know you have the option that john suggested which would be to move on and come back to it and apparently your subconscious brain does work away on these things in the background so that can be a very valid exam technique but if it's one that you know you need to work through start by dismissing the things that are more obviously wrong shall we say and then work your way logically through to the answer actually actually put me out my misery there and tell me i got that one correct animation i think we will have the correct answer highlighted for the audience and which term describes the functionality of the service it is absolutely utility option b uh but i do like that little tip of uh the u utility is not about use the the use don't go together i think that's a lovely little uh technique thank you claire uh vishal i'll come to you with question two harry if you could advance to question number two sure uh so i'll read it out uh out loud um for those of you not watching but listening uh identify the missing word in the following sentence a customer is the role that defines the requirements for service and takes responsibility for question mark blank of service consumption what is that missing word uh and the options are outputs outcomes costs and risks sure okay uh this one also uh this one also is going to play on the similar lines as what claire described earlier so a customer is the role that defines the requirements for the service and takes responsibility for the costs of service consumption for the risks of service consumption uh i i mean i'm going to simply say that these are not the two that works well in this scenario uh responsibly for the outputs and outcomes seems to be the two uh which you should struggle with ideally because the cost and risks are is not something which make the statement correct and in this case if you have sat through the course after the training you would remember that how outputs and outcomes are related to each other so if you remember that then the answer should be straightforward if i'm correct on this one so the answer here then would come to you outcomes of service consumption now this one is by selection but you can also approach this by elimination so [Music] you can you can use each term each option into the statement and simply like say it in your mind say it in your or hear it yourself uh if it does not look right if it does not sound right probably at the subconscious level it is not correct so i'm going to go with option b outcomes okay stuart you raise your hand just worth mentioning because i didn't mention it earlier there will be one or two of this missing word style of questions on each paper there won't be many of them and you note that all of the words we're offering are real ideal terms again this is the actual definition from item of a customer which you should have learned and the things that have been put up as options for you are real things that are not appropriate for this definition thank you uh john i'll come to you next for question number three right sorry actually harry if you advance this slide it should uh it should highlight b outcomes is is the correct answer uh keep in mind uh you may recall uh as a student you learned about sponsor customer and user you know that should also hopefully trigger a memory there uh harry if you can advance to question number three uh john i'll come to you next uh so the question is which guiding principle recommends assessing the current state and deciding what can be reused and the options are focus on value start where you are collaborate and promote visibility or progress iteratively with feedback okay now that i've unmuted i can restate so this again i think comes back to the read the question carefully um where again recommends assessing the current state and deciding what can be reused so this again i think i think the first three questions are a bit about the ability to recall some of the definitions for what's there so as we come through you know we we always want to focus on value um start where you are is about what knowing where we are but also start where you are is also about understanding what you have that can be reused and so this is a case where i think it becomes important from a studying and preparation viewpoint that there's more in this guiding principle as there are in several of them than just what we typically see in that brief statement that that comes out there all right we've got collaborate and promote visibility well yes we know we want to collaborate we know we want to promote visibility but that really isn't so much about assessing the current state and deciding what can be reused but obviously there may be some collaboration as we go through that and again the progress iteratively with feedback um that's a bit of you know do something assess where you are and then figure out the next step but really we're coming back to part of the overall definition for these and so to me as as i go through this um it's not only take the focus on value start where you are collaborate and progress uh but from a testing viewpoint know what a little bit beyond that of what else might be included in that as has stewart talked about earlier i think the other thing coming back and when i go through and teach i like to make clear that when i'm teaching the class i don't teach for the exam um because we don't know what all the questions are as as trainers so i like to have people understand what these mean and understand how to use them and i think the whole key point to me is the more you understand what these are and understand how to apply them then the easier it is to answer the exam question so let me come back i guess the answer i'm saying is b bravo start where you are and harry if you progress the animation i think that should be the correct answer absolutely uh the way i i approach this question is it's asking you what you need to do to understand where you are right now it's not saying that you need to do something so we're not looking to progress we're looking to assess um we're not looking to move forward so that allows me to eliminate uh d uh delta for example um you may need to collaborate in order to assess the current state but you can collaborate to do other things so collaborate promote visibility for me is much more than just assessment so from that point of view for me that's how i eliminate charlie or c so for me it came down to focus on value versus start where you are and of course when you're assessing current state you want to focus on what is valuable what's useful etc etc but it's about deciding what can be reused i come to the second part of that question statement and what can be reused as you begin some sort of change or transformation after having done an assessment so for me that's why i would have landed on start where you are because you're figuring out what you can take forward when you are what can be reused as you move forward so that's the way i i look at that question but moving on yeah i think you brought out another great hint on that one and that is what's the verb in the question and i think that can be true in a lot of questions um come back to the verb is it it's a cess or it's a take action or it's a do something but if you come back to the ver again if you're having a question of i don't know which one come back in the reading and come back to what's the verb and that can help you understand i think which is the correct answer yeah that's it that's a good tip john thank you uh and uh harry if you move on uh to the animation through the animation we will see that bravo start where you is the correct answer moving on um question four harry uh stuart i'll come to you for this one uh which statement about change authorization is correct and there's a long list which i'm not gonna read out in the interest of time but how would you go about answering this question i hate this question why do i hate this question it's very very wordy now i'm lucky i'm a native english speaker i i we we did try not to have questions this long because they are very challenging for people who are not native english speakers so you won't see many of them but sometimes it's the only way we could examine something that was quite important so there's a style of question here which statement about change authorization is correct so they could be about any aspect of change authorization that also makes it a bit challenging but let's look at them a change authority should be assigned to each type of change and change model now as it happens that's the right answer but let's assume i have no idea what that's talking about and skip past it for the minute b centralizing change authorization to a single person is the most effective means of authorization the whole ethos of change enablement and one of the big changes no it's not a change but one of the big shifts in emphasis between earlier versions of ideal and what we're writing about in itel4 is this idea that you need to delegate change authorization you need to avoid having a monolithic consolidated central place for change authorization so b is definitively wrong it's exactly what we tell people not to do so see the authorization of normal changes should be expedited to ensure they can be implemented quickly well i guess you should expedite normal changes to ensure so that's a possible right answer but i happen to remember that this phrase is used in a description of a standard change within the book but it says standard changes should be expedited but nonetheless it is a possible right answer you certainly don't want to slow changes down do you and then d standard changes are high risk and should be authorized by the highest level of change authority that's an easy one to eliminate because standard changes are low risk repeatable changes so we can eliminate d we can eliminate b and i'm left with a or c so let's look at this does the type of change in the change model determine the change authority absolutely it does i know that each type of change has a change model associated with it and within that change model we say who the change authority should be so that makes a definitely correct see the author if c said the authorization of standard changes should be expedited it will be definitely correct so for me it's wrong because it's taken a true statement and changed it to apply to the wrong type of change so i'm going to answer a and i believe that is a correct answer harry if you if you move through the animations i think it will show that a option a is the correct answer uh one i don't know if this is necessarily a tip for the for our listeners um but one thing that i found useful in in answering idol uh questions um is to ask myself is whether an option would be correct in a particular context or whether it would be universally correct and for me that's how i would decide between a and c the author see charlie the authorization of normal changes should be expedited to ensure they can be implemented quickly yes it can be correct in a certain context but it's not universally correct and the question doesn't say which statement about change authorization is mostly correct or contextually correct it is definitively i.e universally correct and for me c is a very contextual application of the guidance it's not universal and that's the way i eliminate c in in this sort of a question thank you stuart uh moving on to question number five kakaroo we come to you uh so this is another type of question uh that we didn't talk about earlier which is lists where we present four statements to our uh two other to the students and ask them which combination of two statements is correct um so here we have a question along the lines of well how does a customer engagement contribute to service level management practice and we've got four statements it captures information that metrics can be based on ensures the organization can meet defined service levels defines the workflows for service request and it support progress discussions and which combination of these four statements is the correct one kakaroo over to you yeah so this type of question as actually mentioned some people do not like it i don't like it either because you need to think sort of twice and also uh the choice is a bit longer so you need to think a little bit and then um this question is from a sample paper and i see many people uh mistake uh choose the wrong choice on this one so you need to be very careful so uh it's about the engagement so you need to know that terminology what the engagement mean and then some people think all about the service level but this is asking about the engagement contribute so uh you don't need to talk about the whole thing about the service level so if you look at the choices uh the one it captures the information that uh metrics can be based on so service level uh at the beginning of the process practice of these engagement you need to understand the standard uh what's good or what's bad about the service level so it can be good and you can leave this one the second choice is ensure the organization meet defined service levels and this might be good but you need to ask yourself is this about the customer engagement or because it's talking about if it meets define the service level or not so this should be happening after uh operating or providing services so uh you may think this may be wrong and then the third choice it says it defines the workflows of the subs requests so uh this you need to trick yourself that the trigger yourself that the service request is something different this is talking about these service levels so this should be something different practices and then the last choice it says it supports progress discussions so uh it is at the state of customer engagement so this can be good so after uh selecting overall the answer should be delta the d one and the four i hope i'm getting it right is the correct answer uh sorry i just need to send our producer hari a message uh stuart please uh you raise your hand go ahead i wanted to talk about the style of question there will be one or two of these on each paper as well not many they will always have four numbered options numbered one two three and four and the four answers a b c and d will always be exactly the same it will always be a is one and two b is two and three c is three and four d is one and four now in case you haven't noticed that means that some combinations will never come up the correct answer cannot be one and three the correct answer cannot be two and four those options are not in there this is important it means if you look through the four options and you see one that you know is wrong i'm looking at this and i'm thinking well three is definitely wrong now that gives me a bit of a clue because it eliminates both b and c i'm now left with either one and two or one and four i no longer need to waste my time on one just check it have a look at two and four that's what we'll determine which is the right answer which of those is right and which is wrong saves a bit of time that's a fair point and i was going to share that tip as well because that's how i approach these i look for the one that i definitely know is correct and then i look for the options which has that statement in there and then i eliminate the others and so it's a question of them deciding which of the other two are more plausible or correct uh i i do have another five questions that i thought we would have time to go through but we've been having such an amazing discussion uh going through uh the various tips as well as looking at some of these questions i don't think we have the time to to cover the rest of the questions so instead uh if everyone's okay with it i'd like to switch to some of the questions that have come in uh from our audience in in the 10 minutes that we have remaining um and i'd like to pick up uh something that seems to have gotten quite a bit of uh commentary and chatter on uh on over on youtube which is how long should somebody study for the idol foundation exam which is sort of a how long is a piece of string type of question um and and the the the folks in the audience seem to have a bit of a consensus that 10 days is sufficient um as trainers uh obviously you you're delivering your sessions in different styles and different durations some people like claire i assume that the itsm zones uh idle foundation course is self-paced so you can take anywhere from well one day to one month um but typically how what what are people's uh experiences with with their typical candidates how long do you recommend or how long do you find that your students need um let's start with john first and then i'll come to i'm doing most of my uh i'll say instructor-led so and and in today's world it could be in two days three days four days sometimes it's full days it's half days um i like to come back and say if we're in a continuous run of two days three days four days within two to three days after finishing the class take the exam beyond that you're going to start to forget things i like to think a couple hours after that so if it's a instructor-led class you're going to have a couple hours i like to when i'm going through it sort of review each day and review those things there but i'd say within two to three days i'm going to say if you take more than 10 days you're going to have to significantly increase the amount of study time because one you forget things and then two i just want to come back and just one other hint when you take the exam you have to take off the hat of the organization that you're working for and you have to put on your idol hat and you have to kind of drop this is how we do it and how we talked about it and when you're stressed you revert to how we do it which i'm going to assume is legitimate there's lots of good reasons that you do it that way and that's what idle is about but when you're taking the exam you've got to take off you know and put on that your your idle hat that you get went through training and answer the questions in that mode but two to three days i think is optimal anything more than 10 up to study time because you're going to be forgetting things that's a fair point i mean there's no sort of context behind the question but i was assuming that the the person who asked the question was thinking more in terms of studying after work you know in the evenings uh before dinner or something like that and if they could only give it up an hour per day how long would they take um i 10 in that from the math of that 10 days does sound about right you know 10 hours to review everything but i do share that concern john that you know by the time you get to day 10 you've probably forgotten what you studied in day one uh claire you you'd had your hand up as well uh what's the experience from an online perspective yeah i just i kind of wanted to comment on this because i went from being a classroom trainer for italy so i was classroom for version two and three and now we create e-learning and that the kind of the two to three days in the classroom is very very good but what we used to find is that a lot of the delegates had the exam kind of hanging over their heads so they were learning they were interested but there was also that little part of their attention that was always thinking yes but what about the exam is this going to be on the exam with the e-learning what we find is people take longer and what we try and recommend that they do is actually pause and apply what they're learning so for example if there's a section in the course that's covering value streams pause there go back to work have a chat with your colleagues start to think about what that might look like in your workplace so that does start to kind of reinforce what you're learning and allow the delegate to think beyond the exam so i think to this question there is no perfect answer you know you will have your own learning style i think everybody's had concentration breaks in 2020 you know who can who can focus on anything for more than 30 minutes this year but um you know get get the maximum from whichever type of of training you're undertaking you know if you're self-studying make sure you're setting the timer side with no distractions if you're in the classroom if it's possible put your phone to one side focus on what's going on join in the discussions if you're taking an e-learning course use the pauses use the breaks to go and apply things in the workplace and if your deadline for the exam is tomorrow you have to take it you can do an all-nighter and you'll probably pass um but you know comes back to why am i doing this when do i need to do it by and what is my personal learning style as well absolutely right um we a second question uh which is probably the last question that we can take in the interest of time um i think uh stuart i'll probably direct this question to you uh we had a question about whether candidates should expect uh to know the difference between what was covered in idle version three and how things might have changed with idol four at a foundation level no not at all there is no requirement to have studied i2 version 3 to be familiar with idle version 3. there is a small risk that because of changes between idol version 3 and iso 4 people who are very familiar with idol v3 could get things wrong if they don't actually pay attention on their training and some things are described differently are defined slightly differently so absolutely not no well one thing it's worth pointing out we had a kind of a overriding philosophy behind the exam which was a candidate who is not entirely stupid and who attended the course and who bothered to pay attention should be able to pass we weren't trying to trick people we were just saying did you come on this course and pay attention so somebody very familiar with itv3 who didn't pay attention during an itel4 course because they already knew it all might well fail that's a fair point um i'm gonna uh start the the whole wrap up of this um there a few things i'd like to share with our audience um if you uh register on axelos.com there is a publicly available sample paper of 40 questions just like the real exam uh and you can get what's also called a rationale booklet which tells you what the correct answer is and why that's the correct answer and equally why the other answers were the wrong answer so it includes quotes from the text and so on it's a marvelous resource uh to take a look at uh once you've passed it for foundation of course or once you've registered for the idol 4 foundation course you uh if you've i believe there's a check box that you want to receive notifications or emails if you've checked that and please do make sure you check that you will get a message an email inviting you to join what we call my itil it's a section of the axoloth.com website where you can find more information behind that registration wall uh you can find uh each of the 34 practices in all that glorious detail you will find white papers you will find uh tool kits and other sorts of resources that will help you apply what you've learned in your class to your day-to-day job um i would be remiss to not plug the app i think stuart mentioned the app uh halfway through the live stream the app is available on google play store as well as the ios store and uh that through a fictional scenario i believe it's a hotel uh service or lodging services allows you to explore the various concepts and models of of item four as well as answer some of the questions uh they're in the last resource which i think i'd like to also highlight is social media um there are a number of uh social media platforms uh linkedin reddit twitter um even our own facebook group and other facebook groups where you can ask questions to other members of the community other professionals about uh for their tips uh for their suggestions even if you're and even if you're struggling with understanding a specific concept you're not able to get any joy out of uh the training materials you have which with all due respect to everybody on this call you're wonderful trainers but sometimes some people might just say you know what i'm just not getting it and they want to seek somebody else's opinion um there are some wonderful people out there practitioners out in the field who can say look this is how i internalized it this is my understanding of it maybe that would be a help to you as well so on reddit r itil is definitely a place to look at if you look for idol 4 on linkedin there are a few different groups where you can pose questions you can ask other people for help um certainly each of us uh whose profiles you can find through the linkedin event uh we're all active on linkedin and you can connect with us uh if if that's the way you want to go uh the tso app as well sample paper there's a wealth of resources out there to help you pass your iq4 foundation exam um so without further ado let me close this off now i'd like to say a huge thanks to everyone of this wonderful panel um especially john who joined in before business hours started and to kaku who has uh been staying up pretty late uh out there in japan so and a special thanks for all of you but sincere thanks to everyone who gave us some of your time today thank you as well to our lovely audience uh we'll have a look at some of the chat messages that you've been posting on linkedin as well as on the youtube live stream to figure out if there are any questions we could answer today and we'll try to figure out a good way to answer those questions maybe we'll do another live stream just like this who knows so uh until we meet again uh everyone take care of yourselves wear a mask and remember to wash your hands thank you goodbye you

Channel: AXELOS Global Best Practice

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Length: 63min 48sec (3828 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020